Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction: (170 Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

The cognitive theory of mental spaces and conceptual integration (MSCI) is a twenty-year-old, cross-disciplinary enterprise that presently unfolds in academic circles on many levels of reflection and research. One important area of inquiry where MSCI can be of immediate use is in the pragmatics of written and spoken discourse and interaction. At the same time, empirical insights from the fields of interaction and discourse provide a necessary fundament for the development of the cognitive theories of discourse. This collection of seven chapters and three commentaries aims at evaluating and developing MSCI as a theory of meaning construction in discourse and interaction. MSCI will benefit greatly not only from empirical support but also from clearer refinement of its methodology and philosophical foundations. This volume presents the latest work on discourse and interaction from a mental spaces perspective, surely to be of interest to a broad range of researchers in discourse analysis.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Mental Spaces and Discourse Analysis (by Hougaard, Anders); 2. Connecting the dots: Mental spaces and metaphoric language in discourse (by Oakley, Todd); 3. The text and the story: Levels of blending in fictional narratives (by Dancygier, Barbara); 4. Fictive interaction blends in everyday life and courtroom settings (by Pascual, Esther); 5. A Semiotic Approach to Fictive Interaction as a Representational Strategy in Communicative Meaning Construction (by Brandt, Line); 6. Designing Clinical Experiences with Words: Three Layers of Analysis in Clinical Case Studies (by Kaufer, David); 7. Compression in Interaction (by Hougaard, Anders); 8. Guided Conceptualization: Mental Spaces in Instructional Discourse (by Williams, Robert F.); 9. Looking at analyses of mental spaces and blending / Looking at and experiencing discourse in interaction (by Cienki, Alan); 10. "Mental Spaces" and "Blending" in Discourse and Interaction: A Response (by Rasmussen, Gitte); 11. Reflections on blends and discourse (by Chilton, Paul); 12. Author index; 13. Subject index

Review :
This book certainly gives analysts more tools for thinking about genres and genre relations than previous works on the subject. This is a stimulating collection of papers that links Fauconnier and Turner's insights about the importance of conceptual blending for the organization of human cognition in to the study of discourse. Most crucially, in line with contemporary research in fields such as ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, discursive psychology and distributed cognition, the volume is a sustained effort to move the conceptual processes that blending focuses on from inside the human mind into the domain of public discursive practice. By investigating both a diverse range of discourse genres including fiction, dialogic interviews, journal articles, courtroom interaction and radio call-in shows, as well as activities such as telling time, these papers demonstrate in most interesting way how discourse and practical action can be seen as the crucial environments for an important range of cognitive processes that are central to conceptual integration. Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction subsumes seven highly inspiring papers that each represent innovative applications and empirically grounded refinements of Mental Spaces and Conceptual Integration theories. The volume hence constitutes a major cornerstone in the development of a discursively oriented cognitive semantics that is answerable to the social world members interact and cognise in. A fascinating exploration of mental space phenomena as they occur in a wide range of rich real life settings. The authors take us on a remarkable intellectual journey, with brilliant analyses along the way, and far-reaching implications for the understanding of the human mind.